The 86-year-old Giorgio Gandolfi began to feel ill while he was at his home in Rezzanello di Gazzola. Feeling a strong weakness, he called him his daughter reporting that he had a strong pain in his chest. The daughter, who was without a car, asked for help from her son Stefano Porro, a twenty-year-old in his first year of nursing sciences at the University of Parma.
«When I arrived at my grandfather’s house I immediately realized that he was having a heart attack» explains Porro. The boy immediately called 118 for help. “We had discussed the topic at university only a few days ago,” he says.
Porro, who lives near his grandfather, arrived on site with his portable electrocardiograph. He found his grandfather suffering and, confirming the chest pain radiating to his left arm, he described the symptoms to the 118 operator. While waiting for help, he performed an electrocardiogram, detecting suspicious anomalies. «The same ones covered in the nursing semiotics lessons held by the teacher Enrico Lucenti a few days earlier» he points out.
With the arrival of the 118 from Piacenza, the situation worsened. «The grandfather went into cardiac arrest, but the doctors immediately began resuscitation maneuvers, applying the defibrillator which delivered four shocks. His heart started beating again and he regained consciousness, managing to call me by name, as if to thank me.” Gandolfi was then rushed to the emergency room of the Guglielmo da Saliceto hospital in Piacenza, where he underwent coronary angioplasty with stent implantation.
